Neuroscience

Log In. Study: Psilocybin Mushrooms Can Help Cancer Anxiety. The doom hung like an anvil over her head.

In 2012, a few years after Carol Vincent was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, she was waiting to see whether her cancer would progress enough to require chemotherapy or radiation. The disease had already done a number on her, inflating lymph nodes on her chin, collar bones, and groin. She battled her symptoms while running her own marketing business. To top it all off, she was going through menopause. “Life is just pointless stress, and then you die,” she thought.

When one day at an intersection she mulled whether it would be so bad to get hit by a car, she realized her mental health was almost as depleted as her physical state. That’s when her 27-year-old son sent her a link to an invitation from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, seeking cancer patients to sign up to take psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, to alleviate their anxiety and depression.

Anti-inflammatory drug gives hope of brain repair after stroke. According to the American Stroke Association, stroke is the fifth leading cause of death in the US and one of the leading causes of adult disability.

The death of brain cells due to lack of oxygen can result in, amongst other things, problems speaking, understanding speech and paralysis. Rehabilitation is a long, often lifetime, process, but researchers have found that a drug already used to treat certain conditions in humans can not only limit the effects of stroke, but also help repair the damage caused.
This tiny brain parasite seems to make rodents braver—and it likes humans, too.

You don’t have to watch Tom and Jerry cartoons to know that mice run away from cats.

Mice and rats are born with an innate, hardwired fear of their feline predators, and the very scent of a cat is terrifying to them. So it was quite a surprise when in 2000, parasitologist Joanne Webster found rats that had not only lost their fear of cat urine, they were attracted to it. The key feature of these rats? They were infected by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. This phenomenon, which Webster dubbed “fatal feline attraction,” is particularly fascinating given the peculiarities of the parasite.
Not Just a State of Mind: Scientists Locate the Physical Source of Depression in the Brain.

In Brief Major depressive disorder affects approximately 14.8 million American adults, or about 6.7 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older, in a given year.

Researchers have found that feelings of loss and low self-esteem are directly linked to two sides the OFC — the medial OFC and the lateral OFC. One in Ten Depression is a mental illness many people still dismiss as a matter of mindset.
The War on Parkinson's: Stem Cells Successfully Injected into Patient's Brain. More Humane Doctors from the Royal Melbourne Hospital successfully injected stem cells onto the brain of a 64-year old Parkinson’s Disease patient.

This operation, the first of its kind, marks a positive step towards developing better Parkinson’s treatment. Researcher Garish Nair, a neurosurgeon at Royal Melbourne, led the procedure.
23andMe Pulls Off Massive Crowdsourced Depression Study. A scientific expedition into the DNA of more than 450,000 customers of gene-testing company 23andMe has uncovered the first major trove of genetic clues to the cause of depression.

The study, the largest of its kind, detected 15 regions of human genome linked to a higher risk of struggling with serious depression. The study was carried out by drug giant Pfizer as part of an alliance with 23andMe, the California company whose gene reports have been purchased by more than 1.2 million people (see "50 Smartest Companies 2016: 23andMe"). So far the vast majority of efforts to locate genetic risks for depression have failed, probably because the efforts have been too small to find anything.

“Everyone is recognizing that this is a numbers problem,” says Ashley Winslow, formerly a neuroscientist at Pfizer and now the director of neurogenetics at the Orphan Disease Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Winslow led the research effort.
Blood test that could be a breakthrough for people with depression. A new blood test could be a first step towards personalised treatment for depression, say scientists.

The test accurately predicts whether or not patients will respond to common antidepressant drugs. Around half of people with depression are not helped by "first-line" antidepressants and a third are resistant to all available drug treatments. Until now there has been no way of knowing in advance which patients will need more aggressive treatment, which might involve a combination of different drugs. Instead, most treatment for depression is conducted on a trial and error basis.
Antidepressant Compound Located That May Come With Zero Side Effects. Ketamine is known to be able to reverse the symptoms of depression very quickly.

It has been shown to treat depression without a matter of hours. Most antidepressant medications take a number of weeks or months for results to be reached. Sadly, the drug comes with many major side effects, such as hallucinations or even dissociation.
Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer. No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli.

The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’. Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer. To see how vacuous this idea is, consider the brains of babies.

Paula came to the London Psychiatry Centre, where Price is a registered nurse, after two years of unrelenting depression. First she stopped seeing her friends. Then she stopped getting out of bed. Finally, she began cutting herself. The steady rise in this diagnosis over the past two decades reflects a little-known trend. The stubborn nature of these cases of depression has, however, spurred research into new and sometimes unorthodox treatments. In fact, the new research has opened the door to thinking about depression not as a single condition but as a continuum of illnesses, all with different underlying neurological mechanisms, which may hold clues to lasting relief.
This Bionic Eye Could Cure Blindness. Just before Thanksgiving, Chicago-based accounting firm Crowe Horwath put out a video instructing employees on what to wear and what not to. In it, company executives are wearing bad outfits that land them on the company's dress code "Most Wanted List.

" Violators stand in a mock police lineup in ripped jeans and wrinkled shirts. The video ends with Chief Executive Officer Jim Powers demonstrating shorts that are "too casual for the office," a "C-E-No.
" It's exactly as cheesy as it sounds.
The virus that could cure Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and more — NOVA Next. In 2004, the British chemist Chris Dobson speculated that there might be a universal elixir out there that could combat not just alpha-synuclein for Parkinson’s but the amyloids caused by many protein-misfolding diseases at once. Remarkably, in that same year an Israeli scientist named Beka Solomon discovered an unlikely candidate for this elixir, a naturally occurring microorganism called a phage.
Study Outlines Why Antidepressant Drugs Could Be Completely Useless & Harmful.

This Startup Gets You High On Dopamine, No Exercise Required. All of the Fun, None of the Workout If you think about it, every company exhibiting at CES is trying to sell the same thing: happiness. But of the booths I visited last week at the yearly electronics trade show in Las Vegas, only one delivered directly on that promise. Nervana (not to be confused with Nervana Systems), a startup founded by a team of medical professionals with day jobs as doctors and nurses, makes hardware that stimulates your brain to release dopamine, aka the happiness chemical.

Nervana CEO Ami Brannon explains to me what I’m about to experience. (The headset isn’t part of it.) The brain naturally responds to stimuli from exercise, music, sex, drugs, gambling, and other activities with a hit of dopamine, which makes us feel a rush of pleasure.
Huffingtonpost. Cream – Audio and neuroscience. New Drug Therapy Could End Chronic Pain. Brain gets addicted to pain, but double-drug approach takes pain away. A brain region controlling whether we feel happy or sad, as well as addiction, is remodeled by chronic pain, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. And in a significant breakthrough for the millions of Americans suffering from chronic pain, scientists have developed a new treatment strategy that restores this region and dramatically lessens pain symptoms in an animal model. The new treatment combines two FDA-approved drugs: a Parkinson’s drug, L-dopa, and a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug.

The combined drugs target brain circuits in the nucleus accumbens and completely eliminate chronic pain behavior when administered to rodents with chronic pain. The key is administering the drugs together and shortly after an injury. As a result of the study’s findings, the scientists are pursuing a clinical trial.
Matrix-style memory prosthesis set to supercharge human brain. Human memory is about to get supercharged. A memory prosthesis being trialled next year could not only restore long-term recall but may eventually be used to upload new skills directly to the brain – just like in the film The Matrix.

The first trials will involve people with epilepsy. Seizures can sometimes damage the hippocampus, causing the brain to lose its ability to form long-term memories.
Lack Of Deep Sleep May Set The Stage For Alzheimer's. Jeffrey Iliff (right) and Bill Rooney, brain scientists at Oregon Health & Science University, look over an MRI.
Does speaking a second language really improve cognition?
The idea that learning to speak two languages is good for your brain has come to be widely accept as fact, particularly in popular media.
Scientists have discovered brain networks linked to intelligence for the first time. For the first time ever, scientists have identified clusters of genes in the brain that are believed to be linked to human intelligence.

The two clusters, called M1 and M3, are networks each consisting of hundreds of individual genes, and are thought to influence our cognitive functions, including memory, attention, processing speed, and reasoning.
Matrix-style memory prosthesis set to supercharge human brain. Network theory sheds new light on origins of consciousness. By Melanie Moran | Mar. 9, 2015, 1:00 PM | Want more research news?

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter » The black dots correspond to the 264 areas of the cerebral cortex that the researchers probed, and the lines correspond to the increased strength of the functional connections between each of these brain areas when subjects consciously perceive the target. The "hotter" colors are associated with stronger connections.
Researchers Reprogram Genome to Produce More Dopamine. In Brief Researchers found a gatekeeper protein that, when inhibited, allows for the transformation of skin cells into dopamine neurons.

Scans prove there's no such thing as a 'male' or 'female' brain. Measuring Dopamine in Parkinsons Patient’s Gives Insight Into How We Learn. Right Side of Brain Can Compensate for Loss of Speech Following a Stroke. Oxytocin Enhances Pleasure of Social Interactions by Stimulating Production of “Bliss Molecule”
Scientists have found that memories may be passed down through generations in our DNA.

Archive

Neurosurgeon Emad Eskandar Thinks He Can Cure Complex Psychiatric Disorders Using Implanted Electrodes. Microglia Plays Crucial Role in Early Progression of Alzheimer’s Disease. Predicting change in the Alzheimer’s brain. A new factor in depression? Brain protein discovery could lead to better treatments: Study in humans and rats shows more physical changes in depressed brains. Depression: It’s Not Your Serotonin. It took 12 weeks to grow this tiny brain in a petri dish. It could revolutionize neuroscience.
Scientist: Most complete human brain model to date is a ‘brain changer’

Big Brother Is Feeling You: The Global Impact Of AI-Driven Mental Health Care. MIT Neurotech: Journey Through the Brain. Direct Brain-To-Brain Communication Used in Humans. Chattering brain cells hold the key to the language of the mind. Long-Held Belief About Depression Challenged by New Study. Scientists Successfully Reverse Emotions Associated With Memory. The secrets of the ‘little brain’ – what do we really know about the cerebellum?
The Learning Myth: Why I'll Never Tell My Son He's Smart